“There have been a few private companies which have tried to move ahead with OIF. One of them was a company named Planktos. [...] The individual associated with this is a businessman called Russ George and he [...] wanted to do a large ocean experiment and so he was able to work with individuals in the island of Haida Gwaii, which is off the West coast of Canada and it’s an island which is an indigenous island.”He worked with people from one village and managed to convince them to give him USD $2.5 million to carry out the ocean experiment. The way he did it was that he claimed that this would be a way to bring back salmon, so they set up a company named the Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation and they convinced the villagers that this would be a successful way of bringing back salmon, because among the indigenous groups in the west coast of Canada is a very big issue.Then, Environment Canada, [the government] agency responsible, learned about this and they told them that he could not go ahead without a permit but they claimed that they had sovereignty and they just went ahead and dropped 110 tons of iron into the ocean. And it seems that there was a plankton bloom that resulted, it is unclear how much plankton they got from that anyway because there are plankton blooms on that time of the year at that place, anyway, but of course he claimed it was a success. [...]Very quickly, we established with allies on Haida Gwaii the council the ‘Haida Nation’, which is the alternative government you can say of Haida Gwaii and we were told that this was the case, that there had been a dump of iron in the ocean. Even though it was presented as Haida project, it really wasn’t; it was a very small group within a village which had been convinced to give him the money.It then became a public controversy, we brought the attention of the media. Eventually, Russ George himself was pushed out of the company. The company was saying that they were not going to do another dump. Meanwhile, they are fighting legalcases with the Canadian Government and they just lost one.

What this story showed clearly with these technologies is that a very small group of people could carry out under the radar such kind of experiments.”

“You can surf the web and it’s clear that the ETC group is at the heart of this [mediatization of the controversy]. They have been following Russ George for a long time and they broke the news. The first three days of hitting the news cycle, the ETC group was interviewed on CBC, CTV… They were all over, ready for us, and we weren’t.”If you look at our response, we were blown away, surprised. The opposite report could have been equally as true, stating that an indigenous company was doing an amazing project. It could have been the other way. The controversy stems from the fact that there was support from green organisations and that’s how the controversy started, it wasn’t ultimately helped by our response.

We certainly have come a long way in how to deal with the media and with people in general. Once we separated our way from Russ George, we decided to be as open and honest as possible. If you look at the facts, our work and our motivations, we are proud of our project! We are happy to work with regulators and eventually do it again. We hope to continue to do so, the best way to move forward is to have frank and open discussion.”We do not consider our project to be geoengineering but the next logical step humanity has to take is stewardship."

“Some of the respectable scientists involved in geoengineering research are horrified at Russ George because it brings them into disrepute. Said this, some of them are quite happy to have relationships with fossil fuel companies. David Keith for example, the most prominent advocate of geoengineering owns Carbon Engineering Limited which is devoted to develop air capture, and Russ George is one of the investors of David Keith’s company. This is a crossover between geoengineering research and commercial interest, which is very worrying.” So, there are people, who are clever enough, to see that the various forces [scientific and commercial] have to be brought together to put forward a respectable case for OIF. But so far, that has not happened. And that’s why those people can’t stand Russ George because he is creating trouble for them, because he is a maverick, who is not recognized for any kind of respect for scientific process.”

I do think that the interests that Russ George had in iron fertilization spurred, because of the Galapagos, Ecuador to bring this issue before the London Convention on Marine Dumping. That initiated a conversation in the international, environmental multilateral agreements that brought it in 2008, before the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) in Oslo because of the same Russ George issue. That being raised, plus a plethora of articles being published in 2008-2009 moving into the Copenhagen Accord, led to the 2010 convention on biological biodiversity agreement, the “moratorium”.

Then, there was kind of a hole, and then in 2007- 2008 things blew up again with Russ George and then in 2009 their cruise was delayed, they were maybe not allowed to go, there were these new international laws, and you had protest groups condemning them. That is a new territory for scientists and I think that really changed the game: that the world was one way 1994-2009, and very different from that year on as it became a more politically hot topic.

That is what hit the scientific community where you are marked as a proponent or opponent in a way that wasn’t really the case, as scientific researchers were thought of just studying iron in the oceans.”

“Somebody whose goal, and all of the people who I know and work with, including Russ George at Planktos even thought some of the things he did were unfortunate, I think everybody involved here is trying to explorepotential solutions that ultimately will have beneficial impacts, even if it is commercially structured and they are plenty of people who engage in business, planting trees for instance, that are trying to do things that are right.

“One, I think they have made all the difference in the world because I think that without them, you wouldn’t have international legal response. If there was no Russ George, there was not going to be the same London Convention. That being said, I think that Russ George as a character, is a bit of a problem. Dan Whaley is a reasonable businessman, respectable, and Russ George, lived on a houseboat and invested a lot in cold fusion and continuously pissed people off and did some crazy things and people seeking taking advantage of the Haida in a lot of the narrative and even before that, with Neil Young, and he was kind of ridiculed and laughed at by NPR and Nature in 2003, so he is an outlier character and he doesn’t seem like ‘oh, this is the future of how we will solve climate change’; it’s this crazy guy.”“I think that discredited OIF a little bit, and Climos tried really hard to distinguish themselves from Planktos in all respects. Saying, we only do ‘fully legitimate science’, ‘we have a science advisory team’, ‘we are doing this the right way’, etc. But I am really curious to know where they see themselves now, I feel like there is a lot less press and interest in Climos now than there was in 2007-2008 and their website hasn’t been updated in three-four years.

So I think that the commercial interest didn’t actually help the geoengineering cause at all. I think it is what pissed a lot of scientists off. Sallie Chisholm [employer] had me do this [study the OIF controversy and write about it] because of how much she was frustrated by the commercial interests and their misinterpretation of the fundamental science, especially Russ George and Planktos.”